In the Old Testament, Babylon is destroyed by God as a punishment for the decadence and cruelty of its inhabitants. But a new disaster has befallen the ancient metropolis - coalition troops serving in Iraq are accused of causing irreversible damage to what is one of the world’s most important archaeological sites.

An exhibition of film and photographs opening at the British Museum in London on Thursday exposes the extent of the destruction to the public for the first time.

American, Polish and other coalition troops set up a military camp amid the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar’s sprawling city, near the modern city of al-Hillah, in April 2003 and stayed there until December 2004.

John Curtis, the keeper of the museum’s Middle East department, said: “A lot of damage was done between their arrival in the immediate aftermath of the invasion and when they left the site. It was scandalous - like driving a tank between the stones at Stonehenge.”

Babylon has been spared the fate of many other historic sites in Iraq, which were ransacked by looters hunting for antiquities, but it will never recover from its occupation by more than 2,000 soldiers.

Mr Curtis said: “The damage wasn’t done by locals. It’s not looting. It’s digging long trenches for military purposes, levelling areas of the site, driving heavy vehicles around it, contaminating earth full of archaeological evidence, bringing in earth from outside Babylon and establishing a helipad in one of the most famous sites of the ancient world. What they did is irreversible.” Once the largest city in the world, Babylon reached its peak in the 6th century BC under Nebuchadnezzar, the king who conquered Jerusalem, deported the Jews to Babylon and built the Hanging Gardens, a Wonder of the World.

Highlights of Babylon: Myth and Reality include several magnificent glazed brick reliefs from the walls of the 2,600-year-old Processional Way that led to Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, a reconstruction of the Tower of Babel and a section on Babylon’s impact on modern culture. It also examines the city’s practical legacy: Babylon gave the world the first-known legal code and written language, early examples of astrology and weights and measures and the use of the number 60 to subdivide measurements of time.

The exhibition has already been staged in France and Germany, but the London show is the first to focus on the present-day threats to the site, Mr Curtis said. “It’s not just Babylon after the invasion. It’s also Babylon in the time of Saddam Hussein.” Saddam used illustrations of Babylon on banknotes, and depicted himself as a Babylonian ruler.

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